Free Republic

On an icy Friday morning, Mahad Omar watched armed federal agents run down the street and tackle one of his neighbors to the ground. They handcuffed the man and put him inside a black-tinted S.U.V. Mr. Omar, 28, an Uber driver, immigrated to Minneapolis from Somalia two decades ago. He had never imagined seeing something like that in his community. “Minneapolis is a great city,” Mr. Omar said after the agents had left and residents emerged from their homes to discuss in hushed voices what they had seen from their yards and windows. Several women wept. “It’s never been like...

An Education Department employee was attending a funeral this week when she got the call: She was being placed on administrative leave because she works on projects that connect Black students, among others, to federal government programs. A disabled veteran employed at the Department of Veterans Affairs grew emotional when he heard about the rescinding of telework options, unsure whether it would mean the end of his job taking care of fellow soldiers. A Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines. Across government agencies, workers eyed one...

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. - A $48 million grant for Isle de Jean Charles, La., is the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the effects of climate change. With a first-of-its-kind "climate resilience" grant to resettle the island's native residents, Washington is ready to help. "Yes, this is our grandpa's land," Ms. Bourg said. "But it's going under one way or another." In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and...

On Saturday, Chuck C. Johnson invited his Twitter followers to send some money his way so that he could focus on his latest project: “taking out” the civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson. Johnson is a 26-year-old California man who has been described as “Twitter’s most infamous right-wing troll” (Mother Jones), a “digital Darth Vader” (Politico), “your least favorite person” (the Washington Post), and “mood slime” (the New York Times). He is best known for outing the subject at the center of the discredited Rolling Stone UVA story, publishing the home addresses of New York Times Ferguson reporters Julie Bosman and...

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed. That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise. But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped....